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The Raspberry Pi: Designed for Children, Bought by Adults

Abstract

The Raspberry Pi was designed to address a specific educational problem: by 2006, British universities were seeing a decline in computer science applicants and a decline in the programming skills of those who did apply. The Raspberry Pi Foundation built a $35 computer to give children hands-on access to programmable hardware. When the first model launched on February 29, 2012, the websites of both distributors crashed under the demand, and one of them reported over 100,000 orders on the first day, against a first production batch of 10,000 boards. Most early buyers were adult hobbyists, engineers, and tinkerers. More than 75 million Raspberry Pi computers had been sold by March 2026.

The Educational Crisis

Eben Upton, a chip architect at Broadcom who was also an admissions tutor at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, noticed in 2006 that students applying to study computer science were arriving with less programming experience than in the 1990s. The reason he identified: home computers had been replaced by games consoles, tablets, and smartphones, devices that were professionally designed for consumption rather than creation. A BBC Micro or Commodore 64 in the 1980s invited a child to type BASIC commands. A PlayStation did not.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation (founded 2008) set out to create a cheap, programmable computer that would do what the BBC Micro had done: force children to engage with the machine rather than just use it.

The Device

The Raspberry Pi Model B (February 29, 2012) was a credit-card-sized computer with:

  • Broadcom BCM2835 SoC (ARM1176JZF-S CPU at 700 MHz, VideoCore IV GPU)
  • 256 MB RAM
  • HDMI output, composite video output
  • USB ports, Ethernet
  • SD card for storage
  • General-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins for connecting sensors and actuators
  • Linux operating system (initially Raspbian, based on Debian)

Price: $35 (Model B); the $25 Model A, without Ethernet, followed in February 2013. The GPIO pins were the key innovation for education: they allowed physical computing (connecting lights, motors, sensors to a programmable computer) without specialized hardware.

The Demand

The first production batch was 10,000 boards, made in Taiwan and China. When sales opened on the morning of February 29, traffic overwhelmed the websites of both distributors, Premier Farnell (element14) and RS Components, and one of them reported more than 100,000 pre-orders on the first day.

The buyers were not primarily children. They were Linux enthusiasts, electronics hobbyists, professional engineers experimenting with embedded computing, and people who wanted an inexpensive server. Children (the intended audience) were a minority.

Industrial Use

More than 75 million Raspberry Pi computers had been sold across many generations by March 2026. The use cases expanded far beyond education:

  • Industrial control: Raspberry Pi computers control CNC machines, 3D printers, and manufacturing equipment.
  • Home automation: Smart home systems, media centers (KODI), security cameras.
  • Embedded systems: The Raspberry Pi Compute Module is used in commercial products.
  • Server infrastructure: Small-scale servers, DNS blockers (Pi-hole), VPN servers.

The trading company, Raspberry Pi Ltd, sells the Compute Module to commercial customers; it listed on the London Stock Exchange in June 2024 as Raspberry Pi Holdings, with the foundation remaining a major shareholder, and the foundation’s income pays for its educational programmes. See also the Open Hardware Movement.

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